Re: RE: Suppressed Voices: McReynolds and Nader (fwd)

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:

> This seems to be a gaping hole in left prescriptions for organizational
> change at the micro and macro economic level. What would socializing IBM or
> UPS, or McDonalds for that matter, look like?

As opposed to small, locally owned enterprises? What would
socializing them look like, and all the
communicational/organizational forms? How wretched those can be was
shown in an article in a recent issue of Dissent by Liza
Featherstone, an excerpt of which follows...

Doug

----

More recently, employees at Powell's Books, a six-store chain in
Portland, Oregon -- who, at $7 an hour, were making no more than
Portland's average fast-food worker, and had just been denied an
expected wage increase -- faced a similar, though more restrained,
counterattack when they wanted to join the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union's Local 5 (ILWU). Owner Michael Powell is a
prominent progressive in Portland who is active in the local
Democratic Party and an outspoken free-speech advocate. His bookstore
is a favorite meeting-place for the Portland left, and at least
appears to celebrate diversity of all sorts. This summer's in-store
readings included lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt and ecofeminist
Charlene Spretnak, and the store's Web site is run in close
partnership with the Utne Reader. So last fall, employees and
customers alike were surprised that Powell fought the union. He sent
out a letter to all his employees' homes accusing the union of
corruption (actually confusing it with a different union); later, he
campaigned against the ILWU's long record as a defendant in
discrimination suits. "You say the word 'union,' and everyone's
supposed to feel all squishy. I don't get it," Powell insists. "I
understand if you're organizing farm workers, or people in
Bangladesh. But this is not that kind of situation."

The union won in April, 161 to 155 -- a very close margin. Paul
Couey, who works in the store's corporate accounts department, says
Michael Powell's bluster hurt the union. "He [Powell] framed it as a
human rights issue," says Couey. "He said the union would quell free
speech. He used all this jargon that sounded progressive -- saying
that we were a small, organic institution, and could respond more
flexibly [without a union]." (There's a grain of truth to this
concern about flexibility. If Powell's really were committed to
workplace democracy, the quirks of U.S. labor law could make it
difficult for unionized workers to combine "management" and
"non-management" roles. But there's no evidence that Powell is
sincerely engaged with such complexities.) Says Couey, "Most of the
flexibility to which he was referring was managerial. We wanted some
flexibility in our own finances!" Because Powell was known to be
progressive, employees were at first confused when he talked about
unions in what Couey calls "such stereotypical" terms. "In early
meetings, some of us felt that if we could explain it better maybe he
would understand. But as it continued it became clear that he wasn't
misinformed; it was a tactic."

Asked why he didn't simply agree to recognize the union after enough
employees signed cards, Powell hesitates. "That's a good question. I
thought about it," he says. "But it just didn't seem like the right
thing." Powell claims that he didn't voluntarily recognize the union
in part because some employees opposed it, though of course it was
also because an organized workforce will make it "harder to compete
in the industry." When I ask Alice Tepper Marlin, a founder of the
Council on Economic Priorities, which tracks corporate social
responsibility (and has showered Ben & Jerry's with adulation in the
past), if she knows of any company that has voluntarily recognized a
union "on principle," she laughs. "It would be very unusual," she
says. Marlin looked through her files, and was unable to locate a
single example of such an occurrence.

So what's going on here? Like New Age religion, that other cultural
pathology of the 1980s, the SR business movement reflects that
period's lack of left political vision and analysis. In its implicit
notion that consumerism could substitute for politics -- aptly
reflected in the title of that Bible of corporate social
responsibility, Shopping for a Better World -- it was, at best, a
lazy and naïve idealism. At worst, it cynically played on the reality
that, in the 1980s, as now, many people were unhappy with a world
centered around corporate profits, yet could imagine no alternative.
It played on most Americans' desire to believe that capitalism,
without any major, messy overhaul, could be a force for good, if only
the people in charge meant well. The movement has spawned many of
what futurist and SR guru Hazel Henderson calls "cleaner and greener"
small firms, and increasingly, large corporations are jumping on the
marketing bandwagon; even Wal-Mart is now a member of Business for
Social Responsibility. The buzzword itself is revealing.
"Responsibility" suggests that, like parents or benign dictators,
people running businesses should make compassionate and sensible use
of power -- while the fact of that power should go unchallenged.

As prescriptions for social change go, then, SR is uninspiring,
inadequate, and unambitious. But it's also a ready-made
rationalization for union-busting; after all, if the people running
the show are the ones who bear all the responsibility, and are cool
progressive folks, why would workers need a voice of their own? Local
4's Michael Cannarella, who coordinated the Powell's drive, has
organized many nonprofits "run by fairly liberal people." "The
reaction is universally the same," he says. "'Hey, we're taking care
of these people, how dare they?' It's like, 'I'm the dad, you're the
kids.' Sometimes the more liberal they are, the worse their reaction
to the union because they're the ones who take it the most
personally."

Michael Powell, for one, has taken the union victory very personally
indeed. "I thought I was a compassionate employer," he says. "I
thought I tried to reward my employees as best I could. That point of
view was rejected. It shakes your confidence in who you are and what
your values are."

"Even employers who want to do good end up acting like employers,"
Paul Mishler observes. "That's why you need unions." As for employers
who claim that they already treat their employees so well that a
union isn't necessary, Mishler says, "That's like asking, would you
need democracy if you always had a nice president? It's a silly
question. The fact is that dictators always end up doing bad things,
and employers are the same. Without a union [an SR workplace] is a
benevolent dictatorship."

Listening to Michael Powell, it's clear that either he's genuinely
anxious that a pack of sweaty longshoremen are going to invade his
genteel bookstore or, just as likely, he's playing on his workers'
status anxieties. "We're not on the docks," he says. "I don't want an
assembly-line work environment. I want to be able to talk collegially
to my employees." Says Mishler, "A lot of people who emerged from
that period of the sixties have this idea that middle-class niceness
is better than working-class roughness. You know, 'they're not our
type of person, they listen to the wrong music, they eat meat.'" Not
only do such attitudes preclude these employers' empathy with
workers, they inform a cornerstone of SR anti-unionism: the
assumption that conflict itself is destructive. Borders' management,
in trying to discourage employees from unionizing, continually
disparaged unions as "divisive," and disruptive to company "culture."
Such narratives exploit employees' utopianism; most people would like
to believe in the possibility of a non-exploitative workplace in
which workers' and companies' interests are the same. This is
probably a pipe dream in firms without full worker ownership. But
rather than inspiring employers at least to try to approximate such a
vision, the rhetoric and practice of corporate socially
responsibility actively undermines it.